A conventional deck of playing cards, such as a poker deck, contains fifty-two different cards arranged in four suits of Ace through King and two wild cards typically called Jokers. Thus, a typical deck has fifty-four playing cards. Each card in a deck, except for the Jokers, has a unique face side. The back side of each card in the deck, however typically has a common arbitrary design.
Card decks of this type are conventionally produced by offset or lithographic printing processes which utilize printing plates or dies to produce the face and back sides of the cards on sheets of card stock material.
FiG. 1 illustrates a printing plate set 20 including the arrangement of playing card printing images on a front plate or die 20a and a rear plate or die 20b.
The front plate comprises a matrix array of card face printing images. The array has six columns and nine rows of image which produce fifty-four card face images on a sheet of card stock material. The cards are arranged in fours suits of cards, Ace through King. Two Jokers are in the lower right hand corner of the plate.
The back plate has fifty-four corresponding, identical back images. The back images are shown as geometric, hexagon designs for simplicity. More typically, the card back image is a highly fanciful design.
When using this technique, the face or front side of a sheet of card stock having the same exterior dimensions as the perimeters of the plates shown in FIG. 1 is printed on its front and reverse sides with the front and back plates, respectively. Thus, a sheet of card stock material having all the images of the front plate on the front side and all the images of the back plate on the back side is produced. The sheet is then cut along the divisions between the images to produce individual cards and the cards are assembled into a deck. Each card in the deck has a unique face side and a common decorative back side.
The cost of the printing plates is quite high. Such plates can cost on the order of hundreds of dollars each. However, when this conventional technique is used, the cost of the plates can be amortized over the useful life of the plates. On a per deck produced basis, the cost of the plates is reasonable if a large number of identical deck are printed.
The above printing technique is limited in that the cost of a single printing is quite high because only one deck is produced for each printing. As previously stated, this is not a disadvantage as long as a large number of decks are printed and the cost of the plates is distributed among the decks. However, this means that each deck must have the identical back design shown in FIG. 1. For example, if it were desired to place a specialized image on the back of a deck of cards, such as a photograph of a child or a picture of a valuable possession, then the cost of printing one deck would be equal to the cost of manufacturing a back plate. The cost could only be amortized and reduced to a reasonable cost per deck if a large number of decks are produced.
Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that a simple retail consumer would want to purchase hundreds of decks having one personalized picture on the back side of each deck. Therefore, the prior art method of printing playing cards has precluded personalization of card decks in this manner.